bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 22, 2022 12:53 UTC (Thu) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027)
In reply to: bbb vs galene by WolfWings
Parent article: Two visions for the future of sourceware.org

> And good solid open source conference call systems have been around for ages

Please name two or three that you like.

> automated subtitling of each speaker

Does this mean real-time speech-to-text?

bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 22, 2022 13:19 UTC (Thu) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link] (4 responses)

>> And good solid open source conference call systems have been around for ages

> Please name two or three that you like.

There are a number of very solid open source servers. The best known is probably Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/), but there's also Janus (https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/), and a number of implementations based on Pion stack (https://pion.ly), such as Galene (https://galene.org), already mentioned earlier in the discussion.

What is lacking, in my opinion, is the client side. Jitsi's client is only really suitable for meetings, not for talks or lectures, while the client most suitable for use with Janus, Meetecho, is proprietary. In Galene, we've tried our best to provide a client that's usable for both meetings and lectures (and, in the latter case, that's comfortable for both the lecturer and for the students), but there's no denying that we'd need the help of a good UI expert.

bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 23, 2022 3:17 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (3 responses)

Are there any non-web-based clients for these sorts of systems?

bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 23, 2022 14:25 UTC (Fri) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link] (2 responses)

> Are there any non-web-based clients for these sorts of systems?

In the specific case of Galene, the protocol was designed to be easy to implement in native clients. As a proof of concept, I've written a lightweight Android client for Galene, which you can download at <https://galene.org/galene.apk> (the source code is not available yet, I'm only just learning Android programming and don't feel comfortable developing in the open yet).

As to the other clients, I am aware of a desktop client for Jitsi Meet, but it uses Electron, and I suspect it's essentially a wrapper around the web client. I am not aware of any native clients for Janus.

bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 23, 2022 23:55 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

It might be worth writing a single protocol library that can then be used by all of the clients, including the web one by compiling to emscripten and or WASM. That would make it even easier to get more clients and a variety of different clients, all with a better level of support for the protocol.

bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 24, 2022 2:43 UTC (Sat) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]

Galene's JavaScript client library is described here <https://galene.org/README.FRONTEND.html> (full JSDoc here <https://galene.org/galene-api/>). Janus provides something similar or better; I'm not sure about Jitsi Meet.

The more interesting thing, in my opinion, would be for multiple server implementations to agree on a common well-documented protocol, so that a single client can work with multiple servers. There's been some effort in that direction with WHIP <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-wish-whip-04.html>, but that's limited to ingress (traffic in the client to server direction only, which is useful for IP cameras and video broadcasting software), and it's too early to say whether it will gain any traction.

bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 24, 2022 8:31 UTC (Sat) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link] (1 responses)

The other comment lists the same three I would have, but ever since Asterisk basically became readily installable on most distro's there's been solid audio conferencing options IMHO. It was just a matter of appropriate interface hardware in some cases, but with modern VoIP phone number availability it's far easier now.

And that's one oversight a lot of 'pure web based' attempts has made over the years IMHO is they forget to support POTS dial-in at times. Folks invest hundreds into their phone and accessories to customize their listening/speaking tool to fit them exactly, don't turn that away. Even (or especially) if they use a browser to view the screenshare.

And regarding 'real time subtitling' yeah, TTS, most folks I encounter use the former not the latter term but I recognize the latter is the more accurate technical term to most implementations. But from a UI/UX perspective... it's being able to turn on subtitling. Doesn't matter if it's using TTS on the back-end or not.

bbb vs galene

Posted Sep 29, 2022 12:14 UTC (Thu) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]

> Folks invest hundreds into their phone and accessories to customize their listening/speaking tool to fit them exactly, don't turn that away. Even (or especially) if they use a browser to view the screenshare.

I would be interested in understanding this comment, but I don't wish to hijack this discussion. Perhaps you could describe the UI you envision by mail, either privately (jch at irif.fr) or, preferably, on the mailing list (galene at lists.galene.org)? (No need to subscribe, I'll manually whitelist you.)